Humanity of Jesus - Part 2 — A.W. Tozer

Peter’s Pentecost Proclamation of the Risen Jesus

Do you men of Israel hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know, him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain, whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should beholden of it.

This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore, being by the right hand of God exalted and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.

Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. Let us pray. O Lord Jesus, we are so concerned that we should be in touch with thee, and that thou shouldst be speaking to us, that we should hear from thee, that we should not turn the wheels of a church, but that we should hear from thee, that we should feel thy pulsations, that thou shouldst show thyself to us, that we should feel the powers of the world to come even now within us, and that thy presence should be so obviously here that we'll sense it deeply.

God, help us now. Lord, thou knowest everything, and thou knowest us. And thou knowest, Lord, thy poor servant who will speak, unworthy to declare that which the apostles declared, but eagerly desires nevertheless of telling the same truth and making the same proclamation.

Jesus as Our Brother in the Humanity He Shares With Us

Therefore, we pray, let there be that which was shed forth then at Pentecost. We ask it in Christ's name. Amen. I said this morning, and I'll repeat just a few lines of what I said this morning, that the witness of Peter here and of those first Christians was a very simple one.

It was simply that one of our own people whom we know has been approved of God and is at the right hand of God now with full authority, and we're believing in him and going forth in his name. They said, in effect, that this man whom we know, this one whom we know where he was born, we know where he lived, we know who his parents were, who his mother was and who his supposed father was, we know about it.

And this one of our race has succeeded and has done what all religious men have dreamed of doing but have never succeeded. He has entered the awful presence from which Adam was expelled, and he has seen the terrible light, he has seen the face of the Almighty God, the Father everlasting, and the proof of it all is Pentecost.

He has shed forth this which ye now see and hear. Therefore, they said, we have a brother in paradise. And I want to talk about the humanity of Jesus then and say that we have a brother in paradise. He said he is not ashamed to be called, to call us brethren.

He tells us that in Hebrews 2. But I have heard someone say that we never ought to refer to Jesus as our brother. But Jesus referred to us as his brethren. Now, I don't kill easily, and when somebody frowns me down and says, never say brother to Jesus, never call him your brother.

I am not going to die easily. I'm not so vulnerable. I want to do a little thinking and praying on my own. And so I reason it like this. See how it sounds. If he said we were his brethren, then is he not ours?

If a man comes up to me and says, My name is Jim, and this is John, my brother, I don't say to John, How do you do, John? What relation are you to Jim? He's just told me. He said, This is my brother, John.

So if John is Jim's brother, Jim is John's brother. Now, is that sensible, or do we have to go to the Greek to find out about this? If that isn't reasonable, I don't know what is. And if Jesus our Lord looked upon his disciples and said, Ye are my brothers, then why can't we look upon him and say, He is our brother?

He certainly is our brother, and therefore let's not be frowned down by those who say, Don't call Jesus our brother. You know what we sing in John Newton's old song that says, Dear name, the rock on which I build my shield and hiding place, my never failing treasury filled with boundless stores of grace, Jesus my shepherd, brother, friend, my prophet, priest, and king, my Lord, my life, my way, my end, except the praise I bring.

So if he believed it, I think he was scriptural in it, and I don't hesitate to say that Jesus Christ is our brother. He's one of us. Now, if we could keep that in mind. He's not a ghost, he's not an angel, he is not a distilled essence of something.

He is a man who was born of a woman and nursed at a woman's breast and cut his teeth and cried at night and had to have his parents get up and rock him. And when he got big enough, he walked the floor and he learned to talk and said, Dada, and then grew to be a long-legged boy, then grew on up to be a strong man up through his teens and became a man, strong man, and at 33 years of age was crucified for us, a man.

All that you went through is a man you went through, so he is a man. Now the human race is known throughout all paradise and greatly honored there. And the angels kneel at the feet of a man and are sent to minister to his brethren, his brethren.

Another song that we sing is, Christ to heaven is gone before, in the body here he bore. He that as our brother died is our brother glorified. All the angels wondering, oh, tis our nature on the throne.

You don't sing songs like that anymore, but that's there and it's in an old hymn book which I have, gotten together by A .J. Gordon, a great friend of Dr. Simpson's and a great Baptist preacher and the founder of Gordon College and Seminary.

Well, he is there and we are greatly honored there because one of our numbers there, if I had a brother who was in the White House, or if you had a brother who was an outstanding statesman in Ottawa, you wouldn't be ashamed, you'd be proud of the fact, you'd be glad of it.

And we have a brother who has won his way through, he hath prevailed and gone through and entered in behind the terrible light and is looking upon the face and has gone back of that sword, that flaming sword that shut out the race, he has gone back behind that into the presence of God and he is there for us.

And he has made our humanhood exceedingly honorable and he has all our human parts. Now I wonder, somebody would say, do you think Jesus eats? Could he eat? Could our Lord eat? Or is that saying too much?

Jesus’ Physical Resurrection and Glorified Body

Now let me read here. After his resurrection and glorification, as they thus stood, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them and said unto them, Peace be unto you. But they were terrified and affrighted and supposed that they had seen a spirit.

And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your heart? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as ye see me have.

And then he knew that they weren't half believing him. And when he had thus spoken, he showed them his hands and his feet. And they still didn't half believe it was the real Jesus. And he said, While they yet believed not for joy and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat?

And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish and of a honeycomb. And he took it and did eat before them. Now that's what it says, and that was after his death and his resurrection. He did eat after his death and resurrection.

And then he says in Matthew 26, For this is my blood, but this I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in the Father's kingdom.

He did eat and drink after he had risen from the dead. He will eat and drink in the Father's kingdom in the time to come with us. So there we have God's man, one of us, like us, bearing our nature, being himself a man.

Christ as Representative, Advocate, and Mediator

Now I want to say three things tonight as briefly as possible. This is really too important to make short, but I'll probably weave a lot that I'm saying tonight into a lot of other of my preaching as the days go by.

But I want to say tonight that Jesus Christ, our Lord, is our representative man there. Now that's why he's at the throne of the Father, and that's why this is relative to missions. That's why it is relevant and has a relation to missions and to all our Christian lives.

He is our representative in paradise. He has full power of attorney from us to handle our affairs and to guard our interests and to keep us in perfect standing. When you have a case that you want an attorney to take before the courts, you turn the thing over to him.

And a good attorney does not even allow his client to go about talking. He says, You keep still. Let me do your talking for you. You don't answer any questions. I'll handle your case before the bar. We have a son down in the city of Chicago.

He's an attorney. The other day he had a case and he was defending a suit for $525 ,000. That's more money than I have. $525 ,000, a little bit more than half a million dollars that somebody had sued somebody else for.

He was defending the man, the person who had been sued. They had the top lawyer in the city prosecuting against him. He said, Well, I just thought, What's the use? When the jury filed in after 13 days of trial, it took out my pencil just to see how much it was going to be.

The bottom, I thought, was $125 ,000, and I was afraid to think of what the top might be. But they said, Gentlemen, the jury, have you reached a decision? The chairman, the head man, said, Yes, yes, we've reached a decision, Your Honor.

He said, What is it? He said, We find no judgment. And what's that? By a miracle has happened. That's Bud. Our son said, My miracle has happened. A miracle has happened. He said, Now what happened here?

Well, a man walked in and defended somebody and won his case and sat down and nobody got anything except, of course, my son. He got paid for his trouble. But the point there is that when you put your case in the hand of an attorney, he speaks for you.

He's your representative, and you don't get up and say, Your Honor, I'd like to raise a point of law. You just sit there and act as meek as a lamb. And your attorney, who knows all the ins and the outs, he works for you and appears there in your stead.

Jesus Christ is our advocate. Now that's not an illustration pulled out of thin air. That's biblical. He is our advocate. And as an advocate, he represents us. He has full power of attorney to speak for us and to represent us fully.

So he's the representative man, but that's not all. Oh, he is so many things. What could I say about him to us? He is our mediator, he is our Lord, he is our advocate, he is our prophet, he is our high priest, he is our Savior, he is our coming King, he is all this.

Jesus as God’s Sample Man

But there are two more things that I want to tell you tonight. He is God's sample man, and he is God's model man. Now when I say that Jesus is God's sample man, I mean that Jesus is what God had in mind when he created the man in his own image and said, It's very good.

This, you see, we were created in the image of God and then we fell. And we in our present state are no fair samples of what God had in mind when he created man. When he created man, he didn't create a man with a bald head.

He didn't create a man with cancer. He didn't create a man with disease or subject to disease. He created a man in his own image. And then we fell. And now we've brought all this on us. And all our groans and tears and sorrows and distresses and sicknesses and finally death itself, we've brought on us by our sin.

And the image of God was marred like a painting in a gallery that has been cut and tied over by vandals and partly destroyed. So the image of God in a man has been so badly destroyed that we're lost in the world without God and without hope.

But God sent a man into the world to become one of us. And then he said, Now this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. This is the son of man who is the sample of what a man ought to be and what a man can be.

This is my sample man. Behold my servant, mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth. And the scripture says, When he shall come to be glorified in his saints and admired in all them that believe, he is the admirable man and the sample man.

He's what God had in mind when he created a man, to echo forth his glory and to reciprocate his love and to contain in himself all of the wisdom and all of the genius and all of the artistry and all the musicianship of God.

He meant it to be in a man. And we sinned and lost out and tragically got the whole thing spoiled and mixed. But God said, I'm not satisfied in the fact that man has sinned. This isn't the finish of this thing.

I'm going to show them what a man can be. So he sent Jesus into the world, a man, son of man without sin. And so that man walked among men. And I suppose nowhere in the world is there anybody that dislikes that man that walked in the world.

He was too wonderful a man. They fought him and hated him there, of course, because he revealed their sin. But as a man, as an individual, even old Nietzsche, the German nihilist, he said, I hate Paul, but I can't help but love that man Jesus.

And all over the world, wherever that name is heard, or anybody knows anything about Jesus, they have to admit there was something winsome, something beautiful there. It was the beauty of God in the man.

It was the beauty of the divine image in the man. It was the beauty that we all might have had if we had not fallen. And though he was God, as I have tried to keep saying all the time, he was still a man.

And so he is God's sample man. Remember it, my brother. Not Abraham Lincoln is a sample of what a man is to be. Jesus Christ is the only true sample of what a man is to be. I suppose there isn't another human being in the last 1 ,000 years as universally loved as Abraham Lincoln.

They say that in Oxford in England, a letter that he wrote to a woman that had lost five sons in battles hanging there, that woodcutter who never went to school a day in his life, there in Oxford hangs a letter that he wrote, a proof of how a man can educate himself.

And the stories they tell about him all over the world. Everybody has adopted him. They even like him in communist countries. They even like him around the world. But he is not the sample man. The sample man is none other than Jesus Christ.

For Lincoln was not a perfect man by any means, and finally died as every other man dies and went back to the dust. For Jesus Christ, our Lord, would never have died, and he died voluntarily and gave up his life, not as an old man tottering over a man who died by disease, but he offered himself without spot unto God.

Jesus as the Model and Prototype for the Church

So he is the sample man. But he is more than that. He is the model man. He is the prototype. He is the original pattern man after which God is shaping all the people that make up his church. He is the head, and all his people are the body, the members thereof.

And so we are going to be like him. When we bury the dead, when it's a Christian, I like to go further than our burial service goes, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, to await the resurrection from the dead.

I say that when I'm not sure about the man I'm burying. But when I know that was a Christian whose body we're putting down into the ground, I go on. And I say ashes to ashes and dust to dust, to await the resurrection of the dead and the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who shall call forth this vile body from the dust and shall make it like unto his glorious body, whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.

God plans to do this. And back in the book of Colossians we read, "'Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.'.

So his image in us is the purpose of God. That's what God is. That's why we're here. Why didn't you go to heaven as soon as you were converted? That's where you belong, because God had a purpose for you.

Why am I not down in the States? Because I've got a purpose here in Canada for a while. And why is this man spending his life in Vietnam? Because he had a purpose over there. He belonged here in Canada, but he went over there.

We're sometimes where we don't belong because we've got a commission. And you Christians, we Christians are down here where we don't belong because we've got a job to do, where God has a job to do through us and in us.

We belong over there because as soon as the nature and image of God came into us, at our new birth, we belonged over there in our Father's house. But we're over here. Why? Because God is busy making us into the image of his Son.

That's why he's working on us. He's working in us, and he's working through us. And he is chiseling and whittling and working until he brings out the image of his Son. And you know that's what God's trying to do.

Trials as God’s Chisel in Sanctification

That's why he lets you go through troubles. We'd like to have it so we have no troubles in the world at all. We Christians would like to get born again and say, well, I'm now, I have eternal life and can't lose it.

Away I go. From here on, it'll simply be gravy and glory. From here on, no, no, friend, not at all. Suppose that Michelangelo was deciding to make a statue, say his great, terrible, wonderful, statue of Moses.

Suppose he took a great piece of marble, and there it was, a great hunk of rough marble. And this Italian genius looked at this chunk of marble, and he saw not a piece of rough marble, he saw Moses frowning out there.

So he went to work with his hammer and his chisel, and he struck. And when he struck, I suppose that the stone being stone made no response, but if that stone had had nerves and feeling, it would have winced and cried out under the blow.

And every time God takes his chisel and his hammer and strikes in order to knock off some bump off you, but you say, I've got no bumps on me. Oh, that's what you think. You've got bumps, all right. And they've got to come off, and they've got to come off, not the easy way.

The Lord doesn't take the lady's buffer, fingernail buffer from her boudoir, you know, and polish like this. The Lord doesn't make saints with a fingernail buffer. He uses a hammer and a chisel, and he's making you so forever and ever you'll be like his son.

He's making you over in the image of his son. That's why you have those hard trials. That's why somebody walks up and sticks his jaw in your face and tells you off and hurts you and breaks your heart.

God Almighty is using a chisel to get bumps off and to smooth you up and straighten you out and make you look like his son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Tribulations and trials and hardships and persecutions and losses and pains and disappointments and griefs and sorrows and sufferings, those are the chisel blows of God turning old fallen Adam's seed into the image of his son.

So he's the model. When an artist works, he has a model. He has somebody he's working over. If they were going to have Brother Gray here and some sculptor was going to make an image of him, he'd have him sit and pose.

I can see it now. He'd have him sit and pose, and he'd look at him, walk all around him, alter the light, and say, Now just hold it like that. And strike a few blows, and slowly there would emerge from that mass of stone the image of the pastor.

Well, you have to have a model there, and Jesus Christ is God's model. And he is busy making us like his son, Jesus Christ our Lord. But now to change the figure a little bit, here's what it says in the 2nd Corinthians, But we all with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, stage after stage, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

So we gaze at God, we gaze at Christ, we commune with Christ, we walk with Christ, and he becomes our model. And the Holy Spirit working within us keeps shaping and shaping us more like his son. My dear Christian people, I notice, and I'll say this to you frankly, and I want the board to hear this, and everybody concerned.

I want them to hear it. There is a predominance of older people in this church, which can only mean that in 20 years the church will be dead unless there's a lot of young people come in to take their places.

But now you older people that have the beautiful grave in your temples, and you're getting older, and you've been a Christian a long time. What has God been doing for you? Has he been making you more like his son?

When Michelangelo first took that piece of rock into, had it wheeled into his studio, nobody expected it to look like Moses. But after he'd worked on it six months, they said, well, it ought to begin to shape up here pretty soon.

And then after a year had passed, if we'd come and say, Mr. Michelangelo, where's that Moses statue? Well, he said, there it is. No, no vision of Moses yet. You come back in another year, and that's two years have gone by, and he says, well, we haven't gotten very far.

And then you come back in ten years, and he's the same rough chunk of unshapely stone he was before. You begin to wonder something's wrong with the stone, or something is wrong with the sculptor. So now, you've been serving the Lord how long, some of you?

Twenty years? Ten years? Five years? Thirty years? Forty years? But no image of Jesus yet in your life. Something wrong here with the sculptor or with the stone, and it isn't the sculptor, it must be the stone.

And the difference between the stone in the studio of Michelangelo and you is that that stone could not resist, and you can. That stone had no will to resist, you have a will to resist. That stone had no temptations, it just needs to stand there and wait to be whittled on.

But you're a human, sentient, living, breathing thing with a will, and you can say no to the chisel. You can say no to the sculptor, and a lot of us do. But the scripture says we're to be gazing by faith and obedience and cross-caring and sacrifice and self-discipline.

We are to be made into his image as by the Spirit of the Lord. Show me thy face, thy loving face, one transient gleam of loveliness divine, and I shall never think or dream of any love save thine. All lesser light shall darken, quite, all lower glories wane.

The beautiful of earth shall scarce seem beautiful again. And when a Christian looks upon the face of Jesus Christ, it's true that all lesser light shall darken, quite, it's true that all lower glories will wane.

It is true that the most beautiful and desirable thing of earth will never be quite desirable and beautiful again, when we have looked upon the face of our Lord Jesus Christ and gazed into that face of his.

Missions and the Proclamation of Christ

Show me thy face. Well, he's the model man, he's the sample man, he is the representative man, and he is, before our God this night, the victorious man. Now, what has this got to do with missions? Everything to do with missions.

Why do we send missionaries out at all? What do we send them out to say? We send them out to say, man sinned, man fell, God sent a man, himself God and man, he died and rose and lives and pleads, he's up there and fully representing us, he's up there victorious, he's coming back again, and he is the model after which God is making his people.

And he is the sample for all the world to see, not the old man limping to his grave, not the old woman wrinkled and ready to die, not even the beautiful baby in the lovely flesh of its childhood. But that man is a sample of what manhood can be.

And so we send people out, I repeat, not to make Canadians, not to make Americans, not to make Englishmen, not to make Germans, not to make Swedes. We send them out to make Saints, to tell a story and present a message and make a declaration which, if they believe and identify themselves with, the work of God will begin inside their lives, the work of changing and transforming.

I tell you, I'm going to fight this new thing that's come into missionary circles, this idea that you're not to make converts one at a time, but you're to get whole villages into the Church and then teach them to be Christian.

I don't believe it. I believe Christians are born as babies are born, one at a time, by the infinite work of God through the Spirit. We're born again, each of us. A family of ten children, each child is born one at a time.

They're born living beings into that family. So it is with the Church, big or little. That Church is composed of those who have been born of the Spirit, washed in the blood, individually born and baptized into the Church by the Holy Ghost.

That's what makes a Church around the world. It's what makes a Church, regardless of which way their eyes slant or the color of their faces. I believe in this. I believe this message. It's not simply a story, it's a message, it's a proclamation.

I believe it. And I've seen it work, and I've seen samples of Saints, men and women who, through the years, have been buffed and polished and chiseled and pounded and blessed until they've begun to take on them a little bit of the glory that's in the face of Jesus Christ.

Heaven as the Community of the Redeemed

Heaven will be heaven not because of Golden Streets. Heaven will be heaven not because of Jasper Walls or Pearly Gates. Heaven will be heaven because it will be a community of redeemed men and women, all of them like Jesus Christ the Lord.

That will be heaven. And they will be there from everywhere. We of the white race, we're not to be so proud. They will be there from the yellow and the black and the red and the bronze and all colors.

They'll be there like the Lord Jesus Christ. For there'll be no Greek and no Jew and no male and no female and no Mary and no giving in marriage. But we'll be like the angels and we cannot die again in that.

We cannot die again. But we'll be like Christ in that we'll be made over in his image. Now is that worth telling to the world? Is that worth telling to a poor frightened world? You know the world is half scared to death.

I don't know whether I just am a good Christian and don't notice it myself or whether I'm not up. Every time I listen this afternoon to the radio, every time I listen, every time I read, they're scared.

People are scared. Some British, I presume he was a scientist, I didn't get who it was. He was saying that the human race was going to be, if we didn't watch it, we would extinguish the human race. Put it out like a light and there'll be no more human race.

I don't know, I'm not scared. I am not scared because God has redeemed the human race. And there's enough glorious saints in heaven right that there'll be a general assembly in church of the firstborn and the spirits of just men made perfect.

But I don't think that this human race down here is going to be extinguished. I think that from all nations and kindreds and tongues and people, God is going to have himself yet redeemed men and women.

And I want to have a part in that. I want to have a part in it. You know, there are three things you can do. You can give, you can go, you can pray. You can give and you can pray whether you go or not.

If you do go, you still have to give and pray. If you don't go, you must give and pray. And such a society as ours has been so organized and so arranged that those who for several reasons, the reason of no call from God, and I believe that not everybody's called to be a missionary except in the sense he's called to be a witness, or health or age or physical inabilities of some sort, they remain in the homeland.

Supporting Missionaries Through Giving and Prayer

And God has given to some people marvelous ability to make money. You read the gifts of the spirit and see one of the gifts of the spirit back in the book of 1 Corinthians and in Romans. The ability to make money, the ability to be a giver, and the people that give up everything and go, depend in a measure, in some sense, upon those who remain.

And thus those who remain support those who go. There were so many people running around, many soldiers running around over the continent during the last war. My brother, he'd come across, he lives in Miami, he'd come across and he said, You know, I've decided that there are two armies.

One army doing the fighting and the other army doing the traveling. He said, Everywhere I look, there's service men. Well, then there's a third army he'd forgotten about. Those were the boys with the torches, the boys with the hammers and the screwdrivers, and the women, what was it, Rivet Melly or something they called them?

The people that were back home, buying bonds, giving, working. So it is, God has his army of missionaries. And then he has his army back home supporting those missionaries. It's only a fair deal, it's only the right thing to do.

It's a privilege on our part to be able to send a fellow over there. I knew a dear man of God, I won't name him, I'll tell you this and quit. That's my third time to quit. A gentleman, he was a marvelous Christian, a marvelous Christian brother and a widely known minister of the gospel.

And he said that when he first began to preach, he said, Lord, if you will bless me more and give me more souls and more money this year, I'll give a tenth of everything. So he did. The end of the year, he got on his knees and said, Lord, if you will bless me and give me more souls and more money, I'll give you 20 percent.

Third year, he got on his knees and he said, Lord, if you'll bless me and give me more souls and more money, I'll give you 30 percent. And he went right up to 75 percent. And he said, more money, more souls, more victory, more blessing, more money.

And he said, I gave finally 75 percent. But he said, you know, I feel I failed the Lord. He said, I think God wanted me to say it nine times. 90 percent. More souls, more money, you'll have 90 percent.

But he said, I stopped at 75. But he said, the result of this is, he was an old man then. He said, I have missionaries all over the world. I have preachers all over the world. I personally put through school and steered them out and got them going.

And now they're serving me all over the world. He said, meantime, I've been going all around over this continent preaching the gospel. They give me money and I give 75 percent of it to keep boys in school and send girls off to Bible institutes and supply missionaries and build buildings over on the fields.

And he said, 75 percent of my income has gone that way. And he was an old, dear brother. He's in heaven now. That works. I don't suggest you give 75 percent of your income. I only say that old man did.

Why, maybe you can't have as many as he had. You can have more than you're having if you'll do something practical about it. Terrible thing when giving the mission bores us. When that time happens, we ought to pray God will take us home.

When giving the mission just becomes a boredom. Not as many people here tonight as there are ordinarily. Why? I don't know. Missionary. Too bad. Well, anyhow, you're here and I won't scold the ones that aren't here for the ones that aren't.

And I only say that you're interested in missions. We have a pledge card here, a good old pledge card. It seems to me that I cut my third set of teeth on this contribution card for the Christian Missionary Alliance.

You will never be asked for it. It's your voluntary offering to God. Now we're going to take the offering. We're going to ask the brethren, how do you do it? Would you take over?